Martin Basher

Martin Basher (b. 1979, New Zealand) received his BA (2003) and MFA (2008) from Columbia University, New York, where he lived and worked for the better part of the last two decades. Recently returning to New Zealand, Martin now lives in Wellington, New Zealand. 

For a nearly a decade, Basher’s practice has focused in on the forms and imagery of retail space. The sharp linear forms of commercial display materials, including acrylic sheet, mirror film, fluorescent lights and extruded aluminium, along with the saturated hues of liquor, mouthwash, hair products and holiday advertising have become an enduring lexicon for the artist. 

Consumption is now an integral part of life and Basher’s practice is a consideration of the ways consumption sites and consumption choices reveal unspoken aspirations, longings and urges. In both his paintings and sculpture, Basher’s work echoes (and amplifies) retail strategy, arranging consumer goods on shelves and other display armatures, and situating these alongside paintings so flawless that they appear, graphic, almost digital. In a gallery setting, these arrangements read with all the trappings of ultra high-end retail. Yet unlike conventional retail display, Basher’s selections of goods upset the expected heirarchies and divisions between products. Instead, the products on display point to a more turgid construction of self. Aspirational objects sit alongside the quotidian, and public and private worlds collapse. Fine booze is paried with hair-loss cream, paintings with drain-opener. Bridle-leather becomes a prop for dirty work-out gear. A dusty sprinkle of illicit powder even coats the shelves. In product, the sketchy outlines of a fraught protagonist emerge. Basher invokes unspoken drives, the mundane and exclusive, the highbrow and lowbrow, and the public and private impulses that inform us as consuming individuals.

Basher is especially well known for his paintings that employ the explicitly abstract formal logic of vertical striping, but that might also be interpreted with a certain social content. With their hot orange and pink gradients there is a suggestion of sunset or dawn, of hot temperatures, and perhaps a nod to the climate change politics Basher has become increasingly concerned with in recent years. Further, work made in the United States over the 2018-2019 winter is inevitably inflected with the politics of government shutdowns, with the crude rhetoric of twitter postings and ugly nativist proclamations; for New York-based Basher it might not be a stretch to read a trace or contour of ‘beautiful barriers’ in the vertical striping of the paintings, and more explicitly so in the collages, where rigid geometry gives way to skewed angels and fugitive materiality, the suggestion of decay, collapse and failure.

Basher has exhibited widely internationally. Recent exhibitions include; One Week Stand, Starkwhite, 2019; Strawberry Coconut Cream Pie, Anat Egbi, 2018, Los Angeles; solo presentations include the Armory Show New York in 2017 (with Anat Ebgi Gallery), and 2012 (with Starkwhite); group exhibitions in London, Los Angeles and New York, art fairs in Los Angeles, Milan, Sydney and Paris; a solo exhibition at the City Gallery of Wellington (2014); commissions for the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki  (2013), The Public Art Fund New York (2011) and Socrates Sculpture Park New York (2008). He has been the recipient of the The La Brea Residency in Los Angeles, the McCahon Residency in Auckland, New Zealand, The AAI residency in New York, and the Susan Goodman Residency in Berlin and his work is featured in numerous public and private collections including The Agnes Gund Collection New York, The Majuda Collection Montreal, The Chartwell Collection Auckland and James Wallace Collection Auckland.

(text courtesy of Starkwhite)